Finished Object - 3-ply Mini

My spinning wheel was one of the most precious things that I moved when I moved house, it came in the car with me and was one of the first things to be moved into the house even before my furniture came the day after. But I haven't done a huge amount of spinning since, horrendous I know! As part of my Virtual Knit Night we did a secret santa swap, and my lovely secret santa partner gave me a wonderful purple, navy and black braid of fibre. Half I spun like I would normally into a traditional two ply, my go to. But the second half I wanted to try something new.

I had heard other people talk about traditional 3-ply when they were spinning and I felt like I wanted to give this a go, and I decided to do it without any kind of research and it would be an experiment just to play around and see what happened. I found it so nice to do, and I might even consider doing it again!

So I weighed out and split the braid into three equal parts and spun the singles. These I made a special effort to keep as thin as possible. It was the first time that I actually spun with an outcome in mind. I wanted the final yarn to be as thin as I could make it, as I knew that having three plys would make it naturally thicker. It went relatively smoothly, we only had one or two snapped threads, and there wasn't too much swearing! ;)

Then came the plying. I kept it really simple with the traditional method, the only problem to overcome was the lazy kate. My tip top super duper snazzy lazy kate... It's a shoe box with knitting needles pushed through the sides to hold the bobbins. Until now it has only had two needles, as I haven't plied anything more then that. Fortunately there was enough space to poke through another knitting needle (as I really am not short of those) and we were all set up and ready to go.

The plying went super smoothly and was even a little more pain free then my normal 2-plying methods, so I was pretty happy. The final yarn had a little bit of a twist to it when it came off the bobbin, but not as much as some of my chain plied yarn. I was really quite pleased, and hopefully it will be quite a strong yarn. I do need to find something to do with it though!

The final measurements of the mini were:
For 24g, 17 WPI (light sport weight), with a yardage of 84.9m.
All in all I'm pretty pleased with it, its soft, squishy and the colours are pretty too. I was also quite pleased that I managed to get a sport weight out of a three ply, as my normal two ply efforts are a sport weight too, which does lead me to believe that the thinner singles really did work their magic. Now to work through the other delightful braids that I got for christmas too!